There was a telling moment in 2005, at a conference held to honor Greenspan’s tenure at the Fed. One brave attendee, Raghuram Rajan (of the University of Chicago, surprisingly), presented a paper warning that the financial system was taking on potentially dangerous levels of risk. He was mocked by almost all present — including, by the way, Larry Summers, who dismissed his warnings as “misguided.”
NY Times September 7, 2009, Paul Krugman
Too many of us know the names of Alan Greenspan, Kenneth Lay, Lawrence Summers (above), and George Bush, and the others who led us into this mess.
I just want there to be a page on the internet that acknowledges the heroic Raghuram Rajan who saw it coming and warned everyone, and to whom nobody listened.
Raghuram Rajan, I honor you on this page, and link you to my other heroes, Gehard Schmidt, Bethany MacLean, Brooksley Born and others, who withstood the calumny of a foolish world to speak the truth with conviction.
You were right.
Aside from watching Germans vote Hitler into power, or noting that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has been running on now for more than 60 years, is there anything more depressing than watching critics urge congress to solve the health care crisis by deregulating even more and relying on competition and free enterprise?
If they do to the health industry what this philosophy did to the financial industry…
Another hero of the financial frauds: Brooksley Born.